Wednesday, 25 January 2017

I'm pleased to say that this new novel comes out in April from Snowbooks! Please spread the word..!

FELLOWSHIP OF INK

The Smudgelings… Professors Reginald Tyler
and Henry Cleavis and their various literary friends… little did they know as
they gathered on Sunday evenings by the fire to drink sherry and read out
chapters from their ongoing fantasy novels that they were wearing thin the
fabric of space and time. All around them in the magical, northern university
town of Darkholmes there were Holes opening up to other dimensions…

Here we are in the 1930s, in the leafy
lanes and lofty towers of an ancient town… where there are witches, demons and
gargoyles mixed up with dons and their frustrated wives and handsome boyfriends.
And, most mysteriously of all, there is Brenda, the rather strange housemaid to
the Tyler household, who is here incognito, for reasons all of her own…

Tuesday, 17 January 2017

I began 2017 reading Alan Bennett and
Carrie Fisher – both books are a blend of memoir and diary extracts. ‘Keeping
On Keeping On’ is a seven hundred page not-quite extravaganza, more of a
consoling compendium, and that’s what Alan Bennett has become for me. He’s the
figure who turns up and tells you that all is – perhaps not quite well - but at
least doing as well as might be expected.

The ten years’ worth of diary extracts are
the highlight of this volume. I’m less interested in the two plays at the end,
which I found quite tricky to read, and the introductions to other plays and
books which pad out the second half of the book. I wonder why Faber think his
fans are as completist as this? There’s quite a lot of repetition of ideas and underlining
of the same themes and, while I hardly ever disagree with what he says, I do
find the repetition tiring in the end. In a book of this length and with so
little editorial crack-down Alan B comes to seem like the J K Rowling of
shuffling about and watching the world go by.

No doubt he would hate to hear this, but
he’s best when he’s writing about what happens when he pops into the local shop
and some woman bumps into him and says something pithy, well-meaning and odd.
Those are his greatest bits. I could do with hearing less about Britten and
Larkin and Auden and I could definitely hear less about church furnishings and
much more about the woman in the post office, or the one outside the corner
shop. I like it best when he’s interested in living people and the random
bumping-into that seems to go on around him.

The switch into Carrie Fisher’s
also-recently published memoir, ‘The Princess Diaries’ was startling. I was
transported back to 1976 and I was amazed to find how young and funny and
dweeby the cast of Star Wars all were. How unaware they were of starring in
something that would end up attracting so much attention. They were not quite
iconic and each having a slightly dull time of it – the highlight being meals
in London restaurants and stolen snogs in the back of hired cars. It’s very
sweet and banal – this tale of being a pretend-Princess who falls into having
weekend sex with a man who can barely talk to her, while during work hours
they’re saving the galaxy.

My favourite bit in the whole book comes
when the film is released and takes off like a rocket. Carrie and her
girlfriends are cruising around LA in a car, staring amazed at the queues going
round the block (hence the term ‘blockbuster’ – which I never knew!) When she
sees the biggest queue of all, Carrie springs half out of the car’s sun roof
and yells at everyone: ‘I’m in that movie! I’m the Princess!’ Then, when people
start to cotton on and pay attention, she thinks: ‘Uh-oh!’ She comes to her
senses, dives back into the car and yells at her friend: ‘Drive away!’

The actual verbatim diary extracts from
1976 are neither here nor there. Sort of Dorothy Parker - the teenage years. A
bit of lovelorn poetry and a lot of longing. But they’re amazing to read
because they’re so ordinary, and because she wasn’t having the time of her life
at all.

Later chapters describe the fandom and
convention circuit – her later career in ‘lapdancing’ as she calls it. There’s
some very funny material here, in what is perhaps the definitive account of the
vast, commercial sf conventions. The highlight of the whole book for me are the
monologues she writes in the voices of fans who have come to see her: extolling
her virtues, bubbling and gushing, accidentally insulting her, and giving so
much away about their own lives. These are monologues almost as good as Alan
Bennett’s own. Her essays are pithy, her memories are entertaining – but it’s her
pin-sharp observation of people, and her pitch-perfect ear for everyday speech
that shows up as the most brilliant of her talents.

It’s a sculptural gift: carving and editing
out the verbiage and leaving a perfect monologue. Leaving a perfect column of
utterance on the page – that’s the real thing. And that’s the thing that both
these wonderful writers – on the surface so very different – have in common.

Monday, 2 January 2017

One of my reading finds at the end of 2016
was Alison Uttley’s ‘Christmas Stories’. I thought it was something I’d dip
into, but I was pulled into her world. Rural, mystical… and so calm. This
Puffin has waited a long time in the Beach House – wrinkled, yellow, damp and
flattened out to dry on a summer’s day years ago. Waiting for just the right
moment. I thought it might be too twee to hold my attention, but I really loved
it. Uttley is one of those people whose writing really takes hold of me.

Remember
that – when you equivocate about carrying on and persevering with somebody’s
book. The ones that really grab you always stand out. You’re in no doubt this
is what you want to be reading. You’ll listen to them talking about just about
anything. You’ll even listen to them repeating themselves, as Uttley does, in
these stories drawn from many different books across her career.

I was also
reading Nina Beachcroft’s ‘Cold Christmas’ from 1974. I feel as if I read
something by her a long time ago, mostly forgot it, and am trying to find it
again. This one was new to me, but hit many of the right buttons – the big
house, being snowed in, the ramshackle cast of people trapped together, not
quite getting on. The kids having their own, quite frightening adventures and the
adults not quite understanding. Spooky animals. A near-fatal accident in the
snow. Some ghostly time-slippage and a mystery cleared up.

I spent quite a
few Christmas afternoons in my study, in the comfy chair with Bernard Socks
occasionally dashing in to doze for several hours with me. I was burrowing down
into pages. Having the usual Twixtmas thoughts about – oh, couldn’t I just stay
here and read for the whole coming year? Wouldn’t that be the best thing? I’d
learn so much. I’d go to so many places. I’d get so much done. I’d be going
deeper into somewhere magic. Somewhere that needs a lot of attention and energy
to keep it going.

Wonderful
passage about how a character is changed for the better by a ghostly experience
–

“As Josephine broke free and ran away laughing
until her stomach ached she had a moment’s memory of her first day here and how
she had been cross, acutely shy and all closed up upon herself. Nevermore could
she be quite as she was: a spirit from the past had broken the little icy shell
of self, the brittle outer covering with which she was encased, to play its own
melody upon her, as upon some musical instrument, and she had responded.”

And this seemed
to me, as I read it, exactly how the best spooky stories ought to feel – the
character is transformed by the experience. They are brought out of themselves,
through having connected with something old and complicated – often something
moving, uplifting, strange or mythic. And it’s more than that – it’s not just
the state of the character at the end of the book, it’s about the adventure of
reading itself. The book itself cracks you open as a reader and plays upon your
spirit – getting in deep and haunting you. And you let yourself by haunted by
it, quite happily.

Books get into
you.

Also,
because of the context of this scene – in which Josephine and Simon decide
never to meet again (because strange things happen when they are together…) it
makes me think all this might be about friendship and love, too. Of the kind
that stops you sulking about yourself. That brings you out into company.

Sometimes
it seems to me that reading is great practice for being close to other people.
Necessary practice. No one ever really tells you this, but it’s true. It draws
you closer and gives you skills and tact for coping with others (and yet –
especially when young – we were always told that it made us solitary and bad at
mixing. When all the while it was the very opposite.) This is a nice set of
epiphanies for the gap between Christmas and New Year. Waking up from ghost
stories and seasonal festive dreams – into new days, renewed friendships – and
a sense of being open to the world.

That charged,
magical feeling was there throughout Margaret Mahy’s stories, too, in ‘The Door
in the Air.’ That feeling of being on the edge of realizing something amazing;
of being dragged into an astounding epiphany by a story. I love Mahy because
she can be winsome and phantasmagorical, but then very down-to-earth and
satirical. She is all of these things in quick succession in this book – with
the accent always on urging us to go out and have adventures and explore and be
brave – and to create and to think of it all as art. To think of what you do as
good as – even better than – anything that’s ever been done before. Her stories
are all about valorizing and celebrating your own abilities and the things you
do with them. She’s brisk, energizing, and so gobsmackingly audacious she makes
you want to stretch your imagination as far as it will go. She’s like a
wonderful aunty, cheering you on. It’s very generous work.

These
are the women I read over Christmas – carrying their books with me as I cooked
and peeled vegetables and turned leftovers into vast puff pastry pies and stood
in the kitchen eating pate on toast with Jeremy and drinking wine. I’d vanish
in the afternoons with my books (all three, I think, out of print) and I’d
marvel at them.